Heroic Will of the Emperor Help!

Got done with our first night of work on Heroic Will of the Emperor, and still having trouble understanding how we can soak with our comp.

Tanks:
- Brewmaster
- Paladin

Heals:

- Resto Shaman
- Disc Priest

DPS:
- Frost DK
- Warlock
- Mage
- Hunter
- Boomkin
- Enh Shaman

Our strat was the following:

CC every other set of rages, and kill 4 together so the hunter could deterrence everything together, but I keep hearing people need to kill each set and soak. Is there anything I am possibly forgetting that we could use to soak the sparks when the hunter has deterrence on cool down?

I made a timeline of cooldown with soakers:

The problem is we can't get 4 adds down at the same time to give the hunter that window to use deterrence to get all 4. They always start to scatter out and stuck with that loan one.

Is there anything else I am missing the comp could do so we can soak every rage set? Thanks in advance.

Heya! We've just had our first evening on this boss as well, and although we have very different setups I hope I can help you a bit:

Dont ever have your warlock soak the courages. Because a mage can blink to avoid the damage, have him soak every courage (or every strength, but for us it works having him on courages).

Dont bother CCing.. but if you insist on doing this you should do the following:
gorefiend's grasp, chillblains, shadowfury, ursol's vortex (*very* important), hunter aoe stun (pinning arrow?), even a ring of frost to just stop them for half a second. You need to find a good way of combining all of these (dont ofc overlap them as all the stuns do DR!).

If you go for killing each set of 2s I'd suggest you go with (following your timeline, not sure it's right)
Hunter
Warlock
Hunter
-Boss-
Hunter
warlock
hunter
Boomkin(last stand+barkskin+devo aura+spirit shell from the Disc and he should survive taking 2 - assuming he gets healed up between them!) This one might be a bit tight as it's alot of things to put up that only last for 6 seconds, and he cant take them together (he has to stagger them). Might be an idea to just kill one of the sparks. Also, pain sup if it gets bad
hunter
-shouldnt there be a boss time now?- if not, then warlock on this (Dark bargain should be back as it's been 3 minutes now)
hunter
boomkin
-insert boss phases where applicable-

Haven't bothered to look through your rotation to see if it'd work, Dain, but just a comment on boomkin - he can symbiosis AMS from a DK, which will work very well for soaking sparks, and make it alot less dangerous.

Well, if you're really sticking with your healers, then you can only have your Warlock alternate with the Hunter on Rages, as said in the post above.
Hunter - Warlock - Hunter. Have Mage do the Courage Sparks with Blink/Cauterize/Iceblock. Your Boomkin can take symbioses on the warlock for unending resolve to help out a soak, or on the dk for AMS.

You could also have your Boomi go Tank and soak the Combo between the hunter. Like Paragon used it on their kill i believe? (might be wrong here, but tank works). Symbioses on the DK for bone shield, so he has another 10% for every soak. You would also have your boomi go resto for symbioses deterrance if your dps is ok. He doesn't heal much, just does damage on the rages as caster and soaks the sparks in between the hunter.

I think you're missing something though. Surely you have more than 2 healers in your raid? There are some HMs you can't 2 heal, so i guess you're just not mentioning him? If your Boomkin goes Resto and your Disc Priest goes Shadow, you have a dispersion to alternate with the hunter. which makes the soaking trivial. Don't you have an alt shadow or rogue or sth like that? Or even a 2nd hunter? Doesn't really matter if you has like 470 itemlevel - if your group can make up for it dmg wise on the adds, you should be fine. If you have a Resto Druid, he can also use symbioses on the hunter for a 2nd deterrance to help out if needed.

Resto/Shadow switch would be the easiest way if you're players are up for it, but the other ways should work fine too. Depends on your players/Gear.

We've killed this both cc'ing and without. Ended up favoring cc's when we have a comp with AoE stuns, mass death grip and good burst AoE, and killing them in pairs when we didn't (as in depending on whether our DK was in the raid basically) :P

Spark soaking was trivial because we always have good classes for that outside of derp moments with a rogue taking strengths, mage courages and hunter / spriest / boomie / windwalker alternating on the rages.

@ Riemu2k3
We use two healers in my guild with me as MW monk and a Holy paladin.

On topic.
I know this might not help anything unless one of you have a rogue alt that you can bring, but I'm just gonna go through our strategi anyways.

When rages spawn we CC one and kill the other. We then have our rogue taking the spark with feint. The second rage is killed as soon as the first one is dead and we the healers heal the rogue up between then two sparks.. This means that our rogue takes ALL the sparks from rages.

And thats really the only trick to our strategi.. The sparks from courages / strenghts are soaked by who ever really have a cd ready.. I Can take 4 of them in a 3 min span. And we have our hunter, our lock, our paladins (if really needed), boomkin and Spriest.

We tried with the 4 rage AoE tactic but we just found it way to messy and alot less forgiving if it got messed up..

@ Riemu2k3
We use two healers in my guild with me as MW monk and a Holy paladin.

yeah sure - but you're not 2-healing empress hc or are you? that would be pretty impressive :-)
anyhow - every guild who didn't kill heroic emps yet, probably are not 2-healing garalon hc or 1-2 of the other hcs later this tier. Not unless you have like seriously skilled healers and the only reason you haven't progressed past heroic emps yet is because a time issue.

what I meant was - the boomkin probably has a resto offspecc or even mainspecc. Or they have a 3rd healer benched which he didn't mention. In both cases it's probably the easiest to have the disc go shadow (you can do decent damage even if you dont have shadow gear) and have the resto or 3rd healer sub in.

and if he doesn't have a 3rd heal at all, he's gonna run into seriously trouble soon. that is, unless his 2 healers are super skilled and geared but then again they would probably have progressed faster then just emps hc.

Well, AMSed Boomkin for 2 Sparks is hard. You can take the first with AMS, heal back up and take the 2nd without AMS. Surviving the first shouldn't really be a problem, you only take like 450k damage tops combined with barkskin (remember, symbioses ANS only reduces 30% damage and caps at 25% max hp). Just shift to bear and you're golden.

You should be able to take the 2nd one after being topped off with barkskin, bearform, ursoc. AMS only lasts 4 secs and will be run out since you need to wait for heals in between.

It's all about the numbers. Each spark does 750k Damage. Toxic Gas does like 16k ticks? So you need to be able to survive 790k % 20% = 632k Damage. Just see if your Boomkin reaches 650k HP in Bear and Ursoc. Throw in a stam flask/food if you have too. But I think that number is reachable.

Our Boomkin is our swing healer/dps so the option to swap Shadow Priest for Resto Druid may work....

If our Boomkin stayed DPS and got AMS, I don't believe he would have enough mitigation with Symbiosed AMS, Bark Skin, and even Ursoc to stay alive.

I wouldn't advise healing this with a Resto shaman - Resto druid comp, you will likely have difficulty with the tank healing, but in the case of the moonkin soaking, AMS + Barkskin is enough to soak a courage spark (done this 2 days ago) but it is cutting it quite close so a disc shield is useful for safety

Haven't done this fight before, but wait a minute, mage's link can mitigate the damage?

Ye, there is a slight delay between the explosion of the spark and when the damage hits the area, so u can use a warlock to teleport or a mage to blink away from the area, therefore avoiding the damage.
It's a bit risky and could take a while for them to master, but you should consider doing this if you feel you don't have enough other options.

Your moonkin can soak just like a mage with Displacer Beast. It doesn't work identically to Mage Blink and thus can be a bit tricky at times, but if it's something you want to try, it's what got my group our first kill a while back. We had mage on every courage and me blinking every Strength with a hunter/pally bubble/warlock rotation on the rage sparks.

You also have the sacrifice the shaman technique if things get hairy

A note on moonkins soaking, using might of ursoc is a bit of a red herring as your moonkin form reduces 15% damage whereas bear only helps with physical (you get the magic reduction by going guardian not just going into bear form) so using ursok in conjunction with AMS and barkskin is basically the same as just staying moonkin with barkskin and AMS. We tried me doing this on our first attempts and without a priest, we needed our Holy Pally to Sac me every time as barkskin+AMS wouldn't kill me, the ticks immediately before explosion and after generally would. So you need a third external cd of some kind to use this method, and if you really must, just take one wipe to get the druid to learn how to displacer beast the sparks and it's time better spent and makes things soooo much easier.

I wouldn't advise healing this with a Resto shaman - Resto druid comp, you will likely have difficulty with the tank healing, but in the case of the moonkin soaking, AMS + Barkskin is enough to soak a courage spark (done this 2 days ago) but it is cutting it quite close so a disc shield is useful for safety

We 2-healed this Fight with Druid / Shaman on our first kill. Was easy as hell. 2nd Kill with Druid / Shaman, 3rd Kill with Druid / Pala.

Kill all rages with one exception. When courage is next kill 1 rage and cc the other until the courage is down. You should also sheep one of the rages each time to make it so it stays far away and is under control while you burn the other rage and single soak it. This requires a rogue or a 3rd tank setup (dk as blood), though I only have experience with the former. The only place you can get behind is when courage comes out... control that and gg if you have enough dmg. The tanks really will do most of the dmg to the boss. Lust on the 3rd break, cc the first rages and have someone pickup the str that comes out right before the boss dies.

A note on moonkins soaking, using might of ursoc is a bit of a red herring as your moonkin form reduces 15% damage whereas bear only helps with physical (you get the magic reduction by going guardian not just going into bear form) so using ursok in conjunction with AMS and barkskin is basically the same as just staying moonkin with barkskin and AMS. We tried me doing this on our first attempts and without a priest, we needed our Holy Pally to Sac me every time as barkskin+AMS wouldn't kill me, the ticks immediately before explosion and after generally would. So you need a third external cd of some kind to use this method, and if you really must, just take one wipe to get the druid to learn how to displacer beast the sparks and it's time better spent and makes things soooo much easier.

Bear also provides added health, which is why ursok + barkskin *may* be the stronger CD here. I'm honestly not sure as it would require some math, but don't discount the 20% stamina gain that bear form gives. I will say that bear form on fights with physical damage (wind lord, blade lord, garalon, etc. etc. etc.) is amazing and far superior to the 15% dmg reduction moonkin form gives.

If possible tell someone to bring their alt rogue to make this fight a joke. That way you lessen the risk of fucking up the rotation and you have someone soaking 95% of the sparks using only feint (no CD).